If you should happen to read this

I started reading them, one by one. These pathetic little last-ditch attempts at altering fate. People desperately clinging to some delusion that just maybe that smile from the gas station attendant meant more than that or that possibly the Hooters waitress was being more than dutifully friendly. Maybe.

You served us on Wednesday around 5 or 6. Your eyes and smile are unbeleiveable. I gave you my card and you said you would call, I’m still waiting.

How long will he wait? How many waitresses will smile before he realizes you can’t read waitstaff the way you can read people in the real world? How many waitresses have unknowingly broken his heart? A thousand. Into how many pieces? A million.

His beer bottle was sweating and so was he. Makes it hard to get a grip. She was cute. She was 19. She was cute because she was 19. Skin doesn’t stay that pink forever. Her nose was too big. She had a really stupid haircut, he thought. He didn’t get it. He was too old. But he wasn’t too old to wait. For a while, anyway.

You wearing a blue top almost bumped into me with your cart in the freezer section, I was wearing a blue polo with a white strip. I really like your hairstyle and your nose peircing and wish I would have taken the opportunity to give you my number, hopefully I’ll be able to see you again sometime.

He kicked himself all the way out of Woodmans. Why didn’t he just talk to her? Why is he such a wimp? He wasn’t buying anything weird, his cart was filled with what you would expect a polo-wearing wimp’s cart to be filled with: frozen pizza, mountain thunder, lunch meat, pop-tarts. Nothing she could have judged. She was buying tv dinners.

He went back the next week. But made sure to shower. Shaved himself clean. Smelled nice. You know, just in case.

And they go on like this, virtual page after virtual page. Long lost lovers who never even knew it searching for their soulmates completely unaware. I can’t help but wonder how often this approach works. It seems the kind of people who would get hung up over a smile from a stranger would be the only ones to read them. The people who are aleady doing the posting.

August 24th (sunday night) I seen you crying in your van at the park you had your windows rolled down , I heard you form distance sobbing , I still think about that night , you crying , I wanted to come up to you and ask you if you were all right. But I’m shy. I think about you often. You were in a Gray Dodge Caravan , I remember the look on your face , when you looked right up at me. I still wonder today. How you are doing? If you read this please let me know your ok.

And before I knew what I was doing I was responding. I thanked him for his concern. I assured him I was fine. Just sorting some things out in my head after a long week, nothing serious just exhaustion. I told him he was kind, he was a good person and had bad grammar. I thanked him again, told him not to worry and said goodbye.

Maybe I just didn’t want him to worry anymore. The thought of a stranger worrying about another stranger made me so happy inside, but he needed to be free of it. I needed to be free of it. These games and stories we make up in our heads hold us captive but they keep us responsible when we have nothing left. Sometimes they are so much easier to bare than the simple truth that a smile is just a formality or a glance wasn’t meant for you. It’s much more exciting the other way.

Around 2:15pm, you were leaving with a friend as I was walking in. Your smile shot me through the heart, perhaps you felt the same.

The Best Part

You go out into the world to acquire all manner of habits and learn all sorts of languages, but the one tongue you neglect most is the one you’ve spoken at home, just as the customs you feel most comfortable with are those you never knew were customs until you saw others practice completely different ones and realized you didn’t quite mind your own-

Andre Aciman

I can’t wait to come back and I haven’t even left. While the planning is exciting and the doing is exhausting, it’s the returning that reveals what the leaving was really all about. It’s after you come back from a journey that you can see what matters, what you remember the most vividly.

It’s always the stupid things. One random walk home after the bars when nothing in particular was discussed. One cup of coffee that you burned your tongue on so badly it prevented you from enjoying dinner. One innocent observation made by a total stranger who knew you only in one context but that summed you up so well you wondered why no one else ever noticed or bothered to ever say it.

You remember how they are different from you. The people you meet or, more accurately, smell. They smell more differently than they really are and it’s this smell that makes them so frighteningly unfamiliar. It’s not that they are any more dirty than you, they are just dirty in a different way. Different toxins secreted at different altitudes is all. But at the end of the day, a pesticide is a pesticide and you smell scary to them too.

When it’s all over, you come home and it feels better than it ever did before you left. Now you’re all cultured and worldly and you cling to your corner of the earth with more ferocity because you see it’s worth defending. The things you scoffed at now seem quaint. The mundane things you do everyday are now sacred tradition. You are no longer a poor, culturally-schizophrenic American. All along, you’ve had what you thought you didn’t and all you had to do was miss it to see it.

You set out to see the world, to learn of its ways and make your impression. As it turns out, its your world that impresses you.